Unbreakable Linux, which initially showed some promise, turned out to be an inside industry joke with Oracle at the butt of it. It just didn't seem to get much traction and the connection to Red Hat, instead of giving it a strong bounce, actually seemed to work against the product. With Sun, Oracle gets additional tools to remake itself into a platform player but also gets a hardware card it could use to raise a hardware vendor either to greater prominence or assured dominance. Let's chat about both.

Unbreakable Linux: Joke to Major Player

Oracle, at least for most of this decade, has performed nearly flawlessly. A company to be reckoned with, it has mowed down or rolled over most of its competitors. IBM and Microsoft are the two exceptions, but even these giants had difficulty competing with Oracle. However, when Oracle created Unbreakable Linux and ran against much smaller Red Hat and Novell, it got handed its hat and became kind of a running joke here in Silicon Valley.

With Sun, that joke gets a lot less funny. Sun still has a substantial installed base of customers who have not been able to move off Solaris to Linux and weren't particularly motivated to move. Granted, they also weren't particularly motivated to buy more, which is why Sun was in the financial trouble that forced it to look for a buyer. In addition, Oracle knows how to do mergers like this. Even the hostile PeopleSoft acquisition had it keeping more PeopleSoft customers than most thought was possible. Given that there is a substantial amount of client overlap between Oracle and Sun, keeping the Sun clients happy should be an easier task. This suggests that Oracle will position Unbreakable Linux as the upgrade to Solaris and, if it executes as well as it did with PeopleSoft, it should end up with a substantial bump in market share for its Linux platform. Enough anyway so that it becomes a real player, and that should allow others to take the platform more seriously.

Finally, it is believed that a substantial amount of code in Linux actually may belong to Sun and, with this acquisition, could belong to Oracle. While I don't expect a SCO moment, I would expect Oracle to use it as a bargaining chip to drive Linux in a direction it felt benefitted the firm. It may be the only company on the planet that might know how to do this without it blowing up in their face. This might make Oracle a leader among equals, and if it played with HP (see below), a real risk to the other enterprise distribution owners and IBM. Coupled with Java, which is both a valid platform in its own right and vastly more strategic to Oracle than it was to Sun, Oracle becomes a real platform company and better able to match both IBM and Microsoft going forward.

Hardware Kingmaker

Sun's hardware revenue has been falling off a cliff, but it retains a substantial share of the installed base for workstations and servers. It is doubtful that Oracle will stay in the hardware business because, by doing so, it would create a substantial competitive benefit for its hardware-independent competitors. Selling it out for cash and a closer partnership could change the hardware landscape significantly. Likely partners would be, in order of interest, Lenovo, Dell and HP. Each would get a slightly different benefit.

For Lenovo, it would instantly give the company server credibility and more direct access to companies that buy a variety of PC products. These Sun accounts probably do overlap somewhat with the IBM accounts that founded Lenovo but server relationships, particularly at the high end, tend to be much more stable than PC relationships because of the related scale and hardware life cycles. It's very costly to migrate. Were Lenovo able to stabilize and, with Oracle's help, protect the Sun installed base, it would exit the process as a major server player and a complete IT hardware portfolio supplier. If Lenovo were able to hang on through the transition, it would be in a vastly better competitive position across its account base than it is today. If it retained some of Sun's hardware resources, it would appear more international than Chinese, which would help it significantly outside and inside of China.

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Found another conversation from late 1997 held by BSD developers. Some discussed their desire to add reliable SMP to FreeBSD.

Key Quote: "Luckily we only have to compete against Solaris and UnixWare, and not good SMP systems... Dynix doesn't run on commodity hardware, and neither does Unisys's SVR4.0.2 ES/MP (which did the locking the right way instead of the Solaris/SVR4 way)..."

"Even if most of Linux was written by Sun, it is under GPLv2, so they might own a part of it, but they don't control any of it in any meaningful sense.

"The only way to have some control over an open source project like Linux is to participate very actively in it. And even that would give a very limited control, as the others can just leave your work out if they don't like what you are doing. This was learned by IBM, for one."

Solaris 8 source code wasn't released on a GPLv2 license! (see the release date of Solaris 8 in the following comment)

Linus Torvalds said in the film Revolution OS (fast forward to minute 4:23 from Free Software goes Free Enterprise, see links below):

"The initial goal was my very personal goal to be able to run a similar environment on my computer that I had grown up used to it at the university computers and I could not find anything that suited me for that, so having been doing computers for all my life basically at that point I just decide I'll do my own. Most of the inspiration early on came from Sun OS which was what I was using at the university at the time..."

Note: a discussion is taking place at themessages.finance.yahoo.com/Stocks_(A_to_Z)/Stocks_S/threadview?m=tm&bn=2942&tid=474647&mid=474647&tof=1&frt=1">Yahoo SCO finance board. This comment helps enhance some of my comments in that board. Thank you.Reply

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